Tag Archives: German

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000)

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We all think we know Faust. The guy who sold his soul to the devil, right? But before there was Christopher Marlowe’s dramatization of the tale of Faust, or Goethe’s two-volume epic Faust, or Rembrandt’s etching of Faust, or Liszt or Berlioz or even Randy Newman’s Faust, there was the actual guy. The historical record finds a Johan Georg Faust born in the last 13th century who went on to become a respected alchemist and astrologer, but who may also have been an outrageous con artist, claiming the ability to reproduce the miracles of Jesus Christ. Rumors suggest that he died in an explosion, a fate which his contemporaries attested to his ties with the devil. Before the century was out, tales of his extraordinary misdeeds had begun to proliferate; one such copy fell into the hands of Marlowe, and the legend of the man who made an unwise bargain with the devil began to spread.

The price of immortality is steep. “Faustian bargain” has become common parlance, and on this very site, two different interpretations of the Faust myth are currently under consideration for eventual induction into the Apocrypha, including a Jan Svankmajer-directed surreal mix and a version of more recent vintage from Russia. Today, let’s dive into a couple more such interpretations, one attempting to faithfully deliver the classic tale with what were then newfangled tools of cinema, while the other takes what it wants from the myth to reach its own, not-especially-lofty ends.

FAUST (1926)

 

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DIRECTED BY: F. W. Murnau

FEATURING: Gösta Ekman, , Camilla Horn,

PLOT: Heaven and hell make a wager over the fate of Faust, a pious man who sells his soul to the devil to save his city from the plague. 

COMMENTS: The short directorial career of F. W. Murnau is so loaded with classics — Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise, Tabu — that a remarkable achievement like Faust could easily get lost in the shuffle. The film more than earns its place in this august company, though, with style to burn. Though the tale is familiar and the visual gimmicks are naturally dated, there’s a freshness to this telling that sidesteps a lot of the expected reservations.

Murnau is particularly proud of his in-camera effects, and he deploys these techniques with Zemeckisian fervor. An early scene in which the devil looms over a small medieval town like the most imposing mountain would have justified recalling the film a hundred years hence, but Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024)

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AKA Dream Story

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You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream. . .

– Edgar Allan Poe

DIRECTED BY: Florian Frerichs

FEATURING: Nikolai Kinski, Laurine Price, Nora Islei

PLOT: Disturbed by his wife’s fantasies of infidelity, a physician crashes a secret orgy.

Still from Traumnovelle (2024)

COMMENTS: “Wanna go. . . someplace else?”

Although not a Surrealist, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle tells the tale of a married man who, for twenty-hours, basically lives his life according to what André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, called “objective chance.”1 After arguing with his wife and losing a patient, Jakob (Kinski) wanders aimlessly around Berlin, ping-ponging from one chance encounter to another, searching for that elusive else, while preoccupied with thoughts of death and sex.

So, if Schnitzler’s story can be interpreted as a Surrealist tale, then what do we expect to see when it becomes a film? Is a Surrealist story necessarily a weird movie? Does it have to contain the cinematic equivalent of melting clocks, or can it treat dream reality in more varied and subtle ways?

Traumnovelle contains only one melting reality scene: when the wife, Amelia, describes her dream to her husband and an animated sequence takes over the narrative. The morphing visuals depict the couple in a variety of landscapes according to constantly shifting art styles. The rest of the film depicts a Berlin filtered through Jakob’s daydreams and imagination. Nothing in the live-action sequences is impossible in reality, but a build-up of eerie coincidences and uncanny repetitions create the slightly sinister atmosphere of a nightmare.

Viewers familiar with ‘s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), also based on Schnitzler’s story, will recognize the major plot points. During an evening at a nightclub, where Amelia dances with a masked man, a pair of women in domino masks tries to pick up Jakob. The question of escape, paired with the teasing offer to play with their VibrateApp, solicits only an echo from the stupefied Jakob: “Someplace else?”

Ultimately, he leaves the girls to their remote vibrator, rescues his wife from the masked man and takes her home. The couple have a heated discussion over whether or not they are both sexually attracted to other people. Amelia then thoroughly shocks Jakob by revealing she would have left him for a random officer, glimpsed in their hotel during their previous summer’s vacation.

To avoid her while he thinks this through, Jakob spends the night on the town. He’s awkwardly hit on by the daughter of his dead patient, follows a prostitute back to her room only to leave without enjoying her services, and eventually runs into a former classmate and medical school dropout, Nick Nightingale, now a shady nightclub performer.

During his strolls through the city, Jakob’s thoughts continually intrude into everyday life in genuinely startling moments. While listening to Verdi’s “A Masked Ball” he pictures himself as one of the Continue reading CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MELANCHOLIE DER ENGEL (2009)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Marian Dora

FEATURING: Zenza Raggi, Carsten Frank, Janette Weller

PLOT: Two middle-aged men, an old artist, and some women embark on a series of depravities.

Still from "Melancholie der engel" (2009)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It is not only one of the most disturbing movies ever, but an incoherent mess that most of the time does not make any sense.

COMMENTS: German extremism has a rich cinematic tradition stretching from ’s infamous Nekromantik in 1988 until today. In the 21st century, where extreme cinema has developed as a distinct genre worldwide, even more disturbing works of dubious artistic quality appear. And in the extreme horror landscape of our day, Buttgereit is no longer at the forefront. A new voice has emerged, as out of our worst nightmares. The name of that voice is Marian Dora.

Melancholie der engel (The Angel’s Melancholy) remains Dora’s most widely known movie, considered by many to be the most disturbing film to ever exist. We follow two men, seemingly with no purpose in life, who seduce three women and take them to an isolated building deep inside a creepy forest, full of dead animals, worms, and slugs. An old friend of theirs introduces himself as an artist early on, bringing another, handicapped, woman with him. And the depravity begins.

Many scenes of violent torture, mostly of a sexual nature, take place both towards the women, and towards living (or even dead) animals. The violence persists from the first moment of the movie, even when its narrative function is not always clear. Rapid editing and many close-ups create a sense of disorientation, while grotesque imagery attacks the viewer from every direction. No coherent story emerges. In the tradition of contemporary extreme cinema, as we read in “Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media” by Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp, we have something more akin to an episodic structure, with the disturbing events being the episodes.

What kind of extreme imagery are we talking about? Images of decay, mostly, in its many forms. Worms, corpses, and decomposition are always in the background. However, the cinematography maintains a painterly quality, especially in its blurry landscapes. The dreadful forest that engulfs our characters reminds us of the forest in ’s Antichrist (2009), if it was even more extreme and perverted. But the real evil remains inside our protagonists, the three men, and their disgusting acts.

The women are not always the typical female victims of a slasher flick or torture porn. Sometimes they seem to enjoy the depravity around them, which makes the movie even more disturbing and difficult to watch. The exhausting duration,  around two and a half hours, does not help either. It is surely a weird movie, but it is recommended only for hardcore fans of extreme horror. Everyone else, stay away from this.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…once we reach the house, that’s when everything starts getting progressively weirder. And filthier… If you like art films as well as scatological torture of young women (you have to like both), and you can handle pretentious dialogue and depictions of real animal death, AND you’re a fan of Marian Dora’s work (a lot of criteria to fill here), you might want to try and hunt down Melancholie der Engel.”–Sean Leonard, Horror New Network (Blu-ray)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Dee Coles.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979)

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When Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and a host of other horror icons were lining up at the doors of Universal Studios in search of eternal fame, somehow the humble golem failed to get the invite. An immensely powerful beast molded out of clay, brought to life by a mystic Hebrew incantation, it may have had too much in common with Mary Shelley’s invention; or more likely, Hollywood’s Jewish studio chiefs prudently sidestepped anything that would offend sensitive and vociferous gentile audiences. Still, even without the spotlight, the legend of the golem has quietly endured, so much so that Golems appear in the vaunted Reader Suggestion Queue twice. Today we examine these two tales, one a literal origin story, the other something more abstract.

THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920)

Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam

DIRECTED BY: Paul Wegener,

FEATURING: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinrück, Lothar Müthel, Lyda Salmonova,

PLOT: When the Emperor decrees that all Jews must leave the city of Prague, Rabbi Loew invokes the help of the demon Astaroth to construct a defender for his people out of clay.

COMMENTS: An early classic of German expressionist cinema, you will find quite a few reviews of this silent rendering of the original folk tale about the avenger of clay. They tend to focus on three main topics: the source material that came to inform the film, the peculiar history of how it came to be made, and a detailed recap of the plot. It feels like someone’s got my number, because that’s where my instincts would normally lead me, as well. So let’s try and cover those basesin one fell swoop, and then we can turn in a different direction: the ancient folktale was codified in a 1915 novel, which writer/director/star Wegener spun into a trilogy. The first two, set in contemporary times, are now lost to history, but the third, a prequel delivering the backstory in which a rabbi summons the warrior to defend the Jewish people but soon loses control of his creation, has survived the years, and that leads us here.

That background established, it’s important to note how neatly The Golem serves to meet the moment while paving the way for the horror legends of the future. While the story is set in medieval Prague, the fanciful decoration owes more to Méliès than the Middle Ages: impossible peaks tower over the city, while buildings are adorned with twisty staircases and walls never Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979) →